Installing and Setting Up Express

The first order of business on the road to building the best todo list application ever is getting a web server/framework in place to handle our backend requests. To do this we are going to use the most popular Node framework out there, Express.² Express is easy to install and get up and running fairly quickly, and it has a vibrant development community, which makes it a great choice for the task at hand.

In a nice, fresh directory, let’s create a new file, app.coffee, that will be the starting point for our Express backend. Right now, let’s just leave that file blank while we install Express.

Express ships as an NPM,³ Node Package Manager, module. We briefly mentioned NPM in Chapter 9, “Intro to Node.js.” NPM modules are bundles of code that are packaged up and distributed and can then be installed, included, and required into Node applications. If you have Node installed, you should already have NPM installed.